Miss R

Reina is two and a half. I think of her as my baby, but she's already a few months older than Will was when she was born and he seemed like such a big kid at the time. She's walking, talking, running and gunning. Let me tell you a little bit about what 2 1/2 looks like around here.

This morning, she meets me at the top of the stairs so that I can get her dressed for school. She's perplexedly pants-less but she marches into her room, stands in front of her closet and announces "I show you what I wear." I proceed to offer a small selection of dresses (because I've learned over the summer that I don't dare offer her a t-shirt to wear with shorts) and she carefully peruses each one until she settles on the green. She doesn't object to wearing shorts underneath said "princess dress" which is a minor miracle but runs away when I start waving the hairbrush around. She starts shrieking before the bristles even touch her hair and one sweaty, wrestling match later, I manage to secure a quick ponytail or barrette and off we go.

This girl is full of pronouncements. I watch cartoons. I go with you. I HEP YOU! (followed by the sound of her dragging the kitchen step stool across the floor to place it in front of the hot stove, quickly grabbing the nearest utensil and frantically stirring the pot as I race in slow motion to get to her before she catches something on fire. Like her arm.) You read me a book. For the record, these are not questions. They are commands, pronouncements, direct orders. And woe to the person, or brother, who doesn't fall in line.

Reina chatters non-stop. Her conversation with you will veer from her favorite animal to where do bears live, sing the theme song for Little Einstein's (which she calls Baby Einsteins), she's hungry, what are we doing next, she doesn't like that and another song. Every once in a while she'll punctuate her dialogue with an "I wuv you SO MUCH!" and I forget about all of the exhaustion, temper tantrums and attitude... for a few minutes anyway. Hey look - she's wearing shorts! I told her this was a 'going-to-the-mountains outfit" and she bought it.

She plays alongside her brother wielding a sword one minute, and the next she's cooking up something in the play kitchen and asking "you like it?" She loves animals but squeals at bees, bugs and the bear that she thinks lives in our neighborhood even though I constantly assure her that bears live in the forest. She wants to wear her Sunday dress all day and wades through every mud puddle on our block. She tells her brother that she's 5 but tells me she's a baby when I call her a big girl.

So in a nutshell, Reina at 2 1/2 is adorable and exasperating. Cuddly and prickly. Sweet and short-tempered. She's so very two.